The ever-changing world of digital marketing is difficult to stay ahead of. With its technological advancements and improvements to our marketing processes, it should make the life of the marketer easier. But the reality is that your busy. And every marketer has, at their fingertips, the tools to be successful.
But there is flip side to the coin. It is that marketers are overwhelmed and often frustrated. It seems like every week there?s something new we HAVE to be doing, or else we get left behind. The problem becomes, this new ?stuff,? forces the marketer to become inefficient and is could be wasting your time and budget. And even worse, there?s the possibility that it was never a good use of time and budget to begin with?
At Perfect Point Marketing we?d like your year to be the year you clean up your marketing toolkit . What things are you wasting time on? What tactics are you inefficiently holding on to like a marketing security blanket, because you?re ?comfortable? with it? And what can you eliminate from your budget to make your marketing more effective? This blog post will outline five activities many marketers waste time but won?t help you move ahead of your competition in 2013 — so you can eliminate them for good!
Do you remember the year 2007 when a small handful of marketers were using social media as a marketing channel? Do you remember how almost everyone in the industry thought it was either 1) a waste of time and ridiculous, or 2) not applicable to their company or industry?
Everyone is now afraid to miss out on the ?next Facebook? and as a result, there?s a whole slew of time wasted on social networks that, frankly, won?t ever really work for you. But you may be using them out of fear of getting left behind. If the social networks you?re using aren?t working — now is the time to stop using them. For example, if you gave Pinterest the old college try, and it simply isn’t driving any meaningful business results for you (like traffic, leads, customers), cut the cord. Just make sure you?re making your decision based on marketing analytics , not gut feelings. It?s important that your tracking your analytics meticulously so that you aren?t missing out on things that really could be helping your company.
Much like the social media bandwagon we?ve all jumped on, most marketers are convinced they need to be blogging for their business. Lately, some marketers have taken this concept to the extreme, pumping out content at assembly-line pace. More blogging is better blogging, right?
Not necessarily. If you?re trying to compensate for low or even mediocre quality with high quantity , you?re doing yourself more harm than good. Readers won?t regard your content well, and as a result, Google won?t hold your domain in high regard, either. Additionally, if you?re resource-strapped, there?s a blogging volume sweet spot you can rest comfortably in.
Here, take a look: 92% of businesses that blog multiple times a day have acquired a customer from it. But 78% of businesses that blog on just a daily basis have also acquired a customer from it. That differential isn?t too big. And if we bring down the volume just a tad to 2-3 times per week, still , 70% of business acquire a customer from their blog. If you’re doing the fire hose blast of ?bad? blog content, scale it back and spend the time creating high-quality content at a lower volume.
To be great at SEO, you need inbound links. But to get inbound links, you need other sites to link to you. Hmm … that doesn?t give you much control.
Oh, I know! I?ll create my own little websites — many marketers have come to
refer to these as ?microsites? — and link to my domain from those!
FORGET. This. Tactic. First of all, maintaining a bunch of websites takes a ridiculous amount of time and money. I mean, where are you getting all the content to keep them going? Plus, for your inbound links to mean anything, they need to be coming from a wide variety of high-quality sites that are relevant to your business. Unless you plan on creating LITERALLY hundreds of microsites that have a ton of clout in the SERPs, this strategy is a waste of your time.
At Perfect Point we?re the last ones to say you shouldn?t be reporting on your marketing; but with the ‘big data’ explosion has also come a whole lot of time wasted interpreting numbers and analytics that might not really mean anything for you right now.
It?s easy to spend an entire day just diving into, say, conversion reports, but what is all that information getting you? The reports won?t do you any good unless you are adjusting your strategy. Pick one thing you can fix this month and do it! Then track it and move on to the next one. A lot of spreadsheets and numbers won?t create a marketing strategy. Figure out exactly what numbers you need to know for your business? marketing, and do deeper dives into specific metrics as needed. It?s a better use of your time, and frankly provides more actionable advice than running hours of reports at the end of each month that you never use.
If you’re worried that you’re going to miss out on important data if you don’t run all the reports in the world, don’t. Use software that captures your data so that, when the time comes to get run more sophisticated reports, you have the historical data to do it. When you actually need it.
The thinking behind the millions of press releases businesses produce each year is that they?ll get picked up and syndicated by an external site, and the syndication will come with an inbound link. Also, you know, getting press coverage.
Unfortunately, almost all the press releases getting churned out of marketing departments aren’t landing any actual press coverage. And the releases that are syndicated? Those aren?t exactly valuable inbound links when they?re getting funneled out to low quality sites. Stop trying to weave an amazing story out of something relatively un-amazing just so you have a PR post. It?ll just make journalists get really used to ignoring you. And your writing time is better spent on other types of content — like blog posts, for instance — that attract qualified readers and quality links. Submit your VALUED press releases when you actually do have a great story then you?ll get the links and coverage you need.
To help you move forward start making adjustments and use our marketing toolkit to help! Want to know more about the marketing activities and tools you?ll need to succeed? Download our ebook today!
